Walt Disney CompanyX marks the spot -- the spot where Cinderella Castle would be built in the Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World. Tromping through the dirt are, from left to right, Marty Sklar, architect Welton Becket and Richard Irvine, then executive vice president and chief designer of WED Enterprises.Imagine hopping in your car, traveling over the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and driving to Flushing Meadows in Queens — for a visit to Walt Disney World?

For a brief time in the mid-1960s, the powers that be in the Walt Disney Company actually did consider bringing the "East Coast Disneyland" to Queens, specifically on the site of the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows.

According to Disney legend and former Imagineering head Marty Sklar, weather was the main reason why Walt Disney World is in Florida and not New York.

"When Walt was deciding where to build the next project after Disneyland, he had Buzz Price do a study on whether it should be New York or Florida and Buzz wrote a very long report — multiple pages — saying ‘Stay away from New York and go to Florida.’ Weather was a big reason for that.

Alice SchmidtTwo young visitors pose for a photo with Goofy at the New York World's Fair."Paris in the winter is not an easy place to operate, either, but it’s Paris, if I can put it that way. We get a little snow occasionally in Tokyo. But basically, they are places that people go on vacation — not that people don’t go to New York — but they don’t go to New York for that kind of thing. You go to New York for Broadway, the museums, the Statue of Liberty and all that.

As further evidence of that, the 1964-1965 New York World’s Fair ran in seven-month seasons — from April to October each year — in an obvious attempt to avoid the chilly temperatures and what would likely have been equally plummeting gate receipts.

When Walt Disney decided to take part in the Fair in 1960, he "had three really strong goals," Sklar said.

"Number one was to create attractions that he could bring back to Disneyland and basically get somebody else to pay for them. Tied into that was the development of the technology. It was a push forward. It would have taken years if it hadn’t have been for the Fair to get to where we got with Audio-Animatronics and with moving masses of people.

"The second reason was to prove that the Disneyland-style of entertainment would work with Eastern audiences.

SHORTAGE OF THEATERS IN MANHATTAN

"My brother was a professor of cinema studies at NYU who recently retired and we were talking about it recently, recalling that back at that time, there weren’t a lot of theaters in Manhattan and it was a hard place for Disney to run its films at the time, and I think that was part of that" question of whether Disney would be successful on the East Coast.

"And the third reason, in retrospect, it was certainly a stepping stone for doing Walt Disney World in Florida."

Building a second theme park, thousands of miles away from home base in California, meant expanding to a nationwide operation.

"We had to grow our staff in every respect," Sklar said. "When we started working on the Fair at what was then called WED Enterprises, we had a hundred people and that was it. We had one little building in Glendale away from the studio."

Alice SchmidtThe colorful dolls of It's a Small World at the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair.For the new hires, Sklar said, it was "great training for Walt Disney World because many of the people cut their eye teeth in doing that, doing it away from the studio, away from Imagineering, and then moved on to Walt Disney World when we started building it.

"The other thing — and this was a huge stepping stone for Florida — is working with those huge companies on attractions. GE stayed with us for 20 or 25 years after the Fair.

"Walt incentivized those companies to come to Disneyland because he actually had to come up with a fee for the use of his name, which had, of course, a huge value. And he made the fee available as a downpayment for the companies to come into Disneyland."

Not only did the attractions and the technology used to make them successful live on, but so has the music which was created for the Disney shows.

Yesterland.comFather takes guests through more than a century of electrical advancements in the Carousel of Progress."Some of the music from the Fair has gone on and on because it was so wonderful. Buddy Baker and George Bruns wrote all that music. George wrote ‘The Ballad of Davy Crockett,’ among other things; he wrote all the music for the Ford pavilion. Buddy worked with the Sherman brothers on ‘A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow’ for GE."

And Baker also contributed to Bob and Dick Sherman’s It’s a Small World score. According to a 1996 edition of the Disney Magazine, "Walt Disney originally wanted the attraction to feature children’s songs from around the world, but in the large, open ride space, that would have been — as Baker described it, ‘Like putting five marching bands in a gymnasium and trying to figure out what tune they’re playing!’ Instead, they came up with the idea of playing the Sherman brothers’ song ... in one-minute segments that repeats throughout the ride but with different treatments for each country."

GE SHOW RUFFLED SKLAR'S FEATHERS

Sklar is proud of most of his contributions to the Fair. One show inside the GE pavilion, however, left his feathers ruffled. "It was a show with a parrot and toucan talking about atomic energy — oh, god, I hated it! I remember writing nine different scripts and I finally said to the guy at GE I was working with: ‘Who am I writing this for?’ And he said it was for his bosses, not for anyone else. And I said, ‘Not for the public?’ and he said, ‘My four bosses like it."

LifeWalt DisneyDespite the enormous amount of time and energy he invested on the Disney shows, Sklar did have time to visit other Fair attractions.

"I loved the IBM show that Charles Eames did. Some of the vignettes and figures that he did, those little animated shows in the courtyard of the IBM pavilion.

"And I really like duPont’s pavilion, where they had the live trio, the band playing and doing big pseudo experiments with chemistry in the preshow. I thought that was really terrific.

"And, of course, everyone talked about the African dancers. They were wonderful."

In the end, though, Disney’s four attractions stole the show.

"I remember Look magazine at the time had a big story with a headline that said: Walt Disney — and giant was in big caps — GIANT at the Fair," Sklar said.Disney proved that "the things that were developed as a new style of entertainment — telling stories in a three-dimensional environment — would work anywhere. It was a big lesson; a big proving ground."

Next: Marty Sklar pays tribute to his mentors ... and is rewarded for the years of service to Disney.